Potentials of Convention Theory in the Analysis of Organizational Learning: The Empirical Case of Negotiating Student Roles in Co-Productive Sustainability Development at Universities.

This paper presents an empirical case study of university-based Green Offices. The goal is to explore and elaborate on the potentials of convention theory in the conceptualization and analysis of organizational learning processes. Since 2010, “student-driven and staff-supported” Green Offices have been widely instituted at European universities as a special organizational form of sustainability management (Spira and Baker-Shelley 2015, 208). The Green Office Movement has formulated specific ideas about the autonomous and instructional role of students, which correspond with current notions of students as co-producers of university processes (McCulloch 2009). This new perception of the role of students implies a fundamental organizational shift for universities. Educational organizations rely on clearly defined membership roles; in other words, students are “qualified” as students in a specific way (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006). I argue that a change in such qualification requires an organizational learning process. To examine this process, I analyze the practice of organizational learning (Elven 2025; Elven and Schwarz 2016; Florian and Fley 2004) using the concepts of Économie des Conventions (EC). Organizational learning emerges as a process that is characterized by competition between interferences of different orders of worth, eventually leading to new organizational conventions, stabilized through form investments (Diaz-Bone 2011).